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The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Swedish journalists document the black power movement in America.

Opened April 1, 2011

 

Q&A with Producer Danny Glover, Director Göran Hugo Olsson, Producer Joslyn Barnes , & Producer Annika Rogell.

 

(Q) : Could you talk about your experience how you negotiated the ownership of the stories and crossing cultures as well as crossing time too in putting together the film? I'm just wondering what you thought about as a Swedish person making films about a history that is partly a Swedish history, is a history if journalism and traveling, but also it's an American story and a black American story and if you have any thoughts about that.

(Goran Hugo Olsson): It's kind of complicated but I think you all know it's an American story but it's form a Swedish perspective. Of course we understand that we do not understand everything of this, but that's a way of telling you that we don't really know everything that we try to understand. But on the other hand, it's a human story, it's about activism, it's about liberation. I think this story of the Black Power movement resonates today.

When we started this film people were telling that demonstrations and revolutions, that's out, that's history that will never happen again. Of course people tend to think that revolution or uprising happen all the time in human history and will continue. Like Dr. King says, "No lies last forever." I think what we learned from this and from Egypt and Tunisia is that when an older generation ignores the younger generation for too long they will have to eat it up big time.
 
(Q) : There seem to be some very deliberate efforts to contextualize the history for I don't know if it's American audiences or any audience, and I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of the behind the scenes production conversations, particularly about anxieties of telling a Black Power history, what might not play in a theater, what can play in a theater, what might be obstacles to distribution.
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson) : The process was a very good one. We found the material and the stories I heard about Janis Joplin's production company, we knocked on their door, and they were amused that someone has gone to the door and we showed some material and they came aboard. Then we showed the material to the people talking on the film, and the editing process was open because we all the material, accessible material, and then we added voices.

What we couldn't do, we were restricted to the material that was actually Swedish. There were so many things lacking, especially the FBI and the enormous resources and energy they put in to stop this movement. That's not an easy thing to get on film anyway, but the Swedish couldn't do it. So we edited it and added voices up to the last minute. The film was premiered at Sundance and I think we edited it the week before.
 
(Joslyn Barnes): I think the question about distribution is a good question because we often find ourselves in conversations about what will the market tolerate, how can we make a film that will be distributed? And I think we have to start asking ourselves "What movies do we want to see?" and create our audience. That's why we're very fortunate to have some great distributors on board with Sundance Selects and IFC are giving us a 15 city theatrical release starting in September. But it's because we can build a movement and we can build an audience, we have to cultivate an audience, and that is a critical part of producing in filmmaking now is to think about how we can do that and not self-censor about what the market will tolerate.
 
(Q) : I think with time, and I want to get your opinion on this, that racism has become more covert rather than overt. I hear more black jokes told as humor, I hear more gay jokes told as humor. How do you see that and how can you fight it?

(Goran Hugo Olsson) : It's not up to me. I can't really say about the situation today. The black people are 30% of the population and 50% of the prison population. I think the world as made a tremendous leap forward since this was recorded, still there is a long way to go. It's not up to me to say that, but in Europe you're definitely right. We see segregation, and we see racism in Europe in a new way I think in the last five years, and that's scary. But I think we're moving ahead but there will be backlashes all the time.
 
(Q) : My question is for Mr. Glover. I'm actually a member of a theater company that is putting on a stage show about the Tuskegee era, and the only reason I'm mentioning that is I want to thank the man from Tuskegee for speaking up. But at the same time I actually found it necessary to walk away from the stage to get involved with a fight with a law school, and now I write for a politician, but I'm finding the same problems today that were on the screen from 30, 40, 50 years ago. And you've been at the vanguard of this and it was nice to see some of the artists that we've come to know and love from different genres to actually speak out. How is it that the message actually gets across without having to sacrifice the art for the science, because both of those take so much time to master? And how do you do both?
 
(Danny Glover) : First of all, I'm a citizen first, and then I'm an artist. I think there's an old Chinese proverb where you always live in a trusting time. I had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday as I attended the Triangle fire commemoration here yesterday in New York, and spoke because my mother and father were union workers. I was born and raised in San Francisco and my mother and father were union workers and they worked for the post office, postal employees.

And they came to the post office when there was a definitive demographic change in who was working at the post office; African Americans. So my parents' politicalization came as a result of the Civil Rights movement and the union workers as well. My early heroes, when I was 13 years old, 14 years old, were people like Stokely Carmichael, and those men, those young people who were not that much older than me who were setting in motion another dynamic in the struggle for liberation in the Civil Rights Movement. And it so happened that I was at San Francisco State College when we invited Amiri Baraka to start a community communication program. And the students, we read everything; Marx, Lennon. I majored in economics because we read "African Socialism," everything, and had political discussions about it.

So when Robert Kennedy talks about the strand of the Black Power movement and all through we all political education with the Black Panther Party. We actually had classes together; members of the BSU and the Black Panther Party had classes together at that time. So I come out of a kind of tradition. I went to work for six years at the Office of Community Development in the Model Cities Program in community development from 1972 to 1978, so that's the tradition that I come out of. So it's hard for me to celebrate the idea of putting in one place, one category this as an artist, and the other category that I considered and my advice for all of us at this point and time is being a citizen. For me, I remember those struggles in 1974 and 1975 or you support NPLA.

All this kind of stuff came out and divided behind cultural nationalists, narrow nationalists, and all those people with principle. So those are the kind of struggles that define my life in that particular period. And certainly as an artist I look to use that in my work. My theatrical background, my theatrical resume, essentially is Fugard. I began doing thoughts about the South African playwright in 1975 when I began to decide to move towards this other phase in my life as an artist. So when I look at cultural art or try to define the kind of work that I want to do, typically I think the industry has a certain path of what they do and Joslyn and I have tried to find what kind of work we want to do, what is important in what kind of work we want to do, and this fit right into the category.

I tend to look for that work and sometimes I found it in mainstream, whether it's "To Sleep with Anger," whether it's "Mandela," whether it's other things that I've been fortunate enough to be able to do. But that's what I suggest to young artists. Your voice is not going to be the same for our voice. You're going to find your voice and you find it around you. There's so much to find, to look at, to be inspired by by what people do in everyday life in Cairo, in Wisconsin, in Tunisia and other places. Look to that for inspiration and you will enhance your voice and try to find and tell the stories that you need in this part of your career, in this part of your life.
 
(Q) : I really loved a lot of the footage; it takes you back to a time and a place. So my question is actually about the footage and is kind of which came first, the footage or the film? I bet there's a really good story about how you stumbled upon that stuff, or was it really neatly organized in Swedish archives and you could just go and find it? There's got to be a good story.
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson): We discovered the footage and I think when I saw the speech from Stokely and the interview with Angela I realized that this was a film, and I thought that it was my duty to take this from the basement of the Swedish Radio Corporation to an audience. As a filmmaker, always when you start a project you have two different parameters. One is that you really feel for something. This is something I want to dedicate several years of my working life or even more, and that you think that this has the potential to a structure, a story, or some kind of cinematic power to it. So it was a combination of that. You have to realize that this was broadcasted a prior time in Sweden, but only once. The Dr. King pieces of course were recycled so many times, but other stuff was broadcasted once and never again. So that's the story.
 
(Q) : How did you come upon the structure of having people comment on it now?
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson) : Really in the beginning I think that was an idea. I saw for a different reason this story was from '67 to '75 and it corresponds with the Vietnam War more or less exactly. But before, the coverage from Sweden was radio reports they broadcasted with American newsreel footage. So '67 was the year they started to go to America and collect their own stuff.
 
(Q) : Could you talk about how you balance out the structure of the film? There are a lot of great interviews, but at the same time you have very intimate scenes. Talk about how you balanced that out because you also have to tell the historical point and because you're a Swedish filmmaker you have to tell it to people who don't study much Black history as well. Could you talk about how you balanced out the story?
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson): I think the question was how we balance political facts and more cinematic moments or sensitive moments, and of course that's pure filmmaking, that's what we do everyday. But in this case we had a very good discussion among the team, the voices in the film about what's important, this is nice, and so on. So as I said, it was a very open structure. But the balance is very much ordinary filmmaking.
 
(Q) : In the story you show the Black Power movement being destroyed drugs, in particular heroin, which I thought was perhaps just one of many alternate endings you could have shown for the movement. I'm wondering if that was a conscious choice and if so why?
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson): It's a natural arc and this movement was connected to the Leftist movement and the solidarity movement around the globe. But I think the most visual signs of the decline of the movement was the drugs. I don't think we're really saying that the CIA and the FBI put drugs into the community, but they didn't do anything to stop it, that's my opinion for sure.
 
(Joslyn Barnes): I think the film is pretty clear in the way it shows the transition of the Black Power movement and the Black Nationalist struggle to a broader critique through the Black Panther party of capitalism and the connection of capitalism to violence, state violence, war, and other elements. And I think that it also is quite clear about the way the movement was presented in the media, in the public view as a battle between the police and the Black Panther Party. And I think you probably noticed in the film that every major leader of the movement was in fact in jail or assassinated, with the exception of one or two people.

And as Angela points out very clearly, you can't actually wage a struggle when people are in jail or dead. And on top of that I think it's also clear that the influx of drugs, which we know now helped to fund the Vietnam War and later the Iran-Contra; in fact it was the same people recently lionized in an obituary in the "New York Times," Richard Armitage, who was one of the main players in both. I think it was quite deliberate, the influx of drugs into that community. So I would say that there are many, many layers to the undermining of the Black Power movement, but I think also you could see in the contemporary commentary that the Black Power movement has its influence today certainly, and lives on.

(Danny Glover) : If you read Dr. King's last book, "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" just before the second Selma march there's a major discussion along with Stokely and James Forman all night into the night about the term Black Power. King tried to discourage them from using the term Black Power because he felt it would alienate white supporters. A whole chapter devoted to that in the book. So the emergence of this idea and as the ideas and the ideals of the Civil Rights movement and the objectives of the Civil Rights movement with expectations of the Civil Rights movement, passed the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and other things that were happening, was an empty promise.

And basically the Black Power movement emerged out in response to that in urban areas. One of the things that King was never able to contend with, and he said this so often, it's one thing to let somebody shit in their toilet as opposed to allowing them into the halls of their power. And King writes in his last book that that is the battle to be waged and how is that battle going to be waged? Because we're able to look at this movement and this transition as an extended, and I said a reimagination of democracy is what I called it, and I watched that in some sense because after I finished San Francisco State I came to work in the Black community in San Francisco while the Black Panther Party was still has a very, very powerful space in that community.

What had happened essentially is that through all the attacks, and the attacks were vicious all over the country, but my theory at the time and much later on was the fact that what they did was they attacked all the outlining chapters of the Black Panther Party while at the same time did not attack the Open Office, and that in itself caused a great deal of dissention within the party itself. The party had been infiltrated through spies and through agent provocateurs at that particular point and time. Two friends of mine subsequently were murdered, were killed as a result of what had happened among this infighting within the Black Panther Party. So what emerged out of that period was the period of the Poverty Program essentially.

The Poverty Program and the program I worked in out in the Bay at Hunter's Point and in Southeast San Francisco and also the Mission District in San Francisco was a program where people began to kind of take those ideas around the Black Panther Party and Black empowerment and translate that into real grass root political action. How do we begin to effectively change the housing pattern? How do we effectively change the education? In the Office of Community Development they identified education, health care, housing, and business development are the four things that came out of that right there.

But immediately after that they became even further disenfranchised. Even though they felt they had the voice certain city government was using that and changing the way that voice was articulated at that particular point and time. And immediately after that and during that time you see the emergence of crack in the Black community in the same neighborhood. Some of those same guys that I worked with in 1972, in 1973, by 1974, 1975 are on crack cocaine, and that's the reality of it. It's a very, very amazing time because there were other things that were happening as well.

The Left itself has lost a great deal of its vision and visibility within the struggle itself. The Left movement's been attacked since post-World War II and has now basically disappeared from the scene as a viable discussion. And so there was no analysis, at the same time there was absolutely no increase of movement at the same time, and certainly as the situation became even direr we found drugs being the course of action for everybody. I had three of my brothers on crack cocaine.
 
(Q) : I had a question about distribution of sorts, and it's spurred in part by the comments you made earlier. A revolution is being originated in many cases by people who are quite invisible and quite disconnected from power, particularly from power in the media. And I'm wondering if this is something that led you in part to be using contemporary voices within the film, and I'm wondering whether in any case whether you all have thought about ways of distributing the film or things about the film.
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson) : As I said, when I discovered the material I saw it as an opportunity to make a film, but I also saw it as a duty to put this out to a wider audience. The goal for me is to have this film in libraries, in schools and universities in American and around the world. I wanted to see a film that was like a book, and in order to not have a dvd cover being grey with education purpose on it you have to make it fit and make a film that's like editing and putting music and everything into it and then show it at festivals to make it more attractive for the purpose who buys it for the library.

So my hope is that this material should be available for students or interested persons forever. I didn't really think about distribution and theatrical release; you just want to do good, good work, the best you can. Some beautiful films don't make it to theater or to MoMA or whatever and you can't think about it because if you try to decide a film with that kind of goal I think you've lost your way.
 
(Q) : I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the reactions around the world.
 
(Annika Rogell): We showed it in Germany and Berlin and also yesterday we showed it in Sweden for the first time. And we also screened it for the filmmakers that made the films in the '60s and the '70s and they really loved it and of course they see different things. They see the Swedish perspective also but I think they see it kind of like you do.
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson): It's two different cases; international cases and American cases. Of course people in Sweden love to death when they're into Holland. Ironic, funny, whatever, how they are expressing themselves and so on. And all the reports and images they are known to people in Sweden, so that's the difference. I think we are very much the same.

(Annika Rogell) : The Berlin audiences and the Swedish audiences are kind of quiet, so I have to give you credit for actually applauding and laughing during the film, because that was the first time I saw that.
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson) : The film is high paced and Germans, they're not used to listening to English in that pace so they really had to try to get it. So Americans, you get it. It's easier for you.
 
(Q) : I wanted to speak to the situation right now in the United States, where this film for me is current. I was in many of those places in the '60s and the early '70s, but on the other hand right now we have an emergency crisis situation. There's a point early in the film where someone spoke about how when he was doing research about Stokely Carmichael that the FBI was following him about that. And there were other things that talk about hip hop and other means of discussing the possibility of violence or the possibility of liberation or revolution right now that he thought was the subject of Stokely Carmichael.

I want to mention that today I heard about a group of third graders who went of to Times Square this year to protest child labor and the harvesting of cocoa beans for chocolate. They went to the M&Ms site in Times Square. And it just feels like this film is very important to get out there and I wonder if you feel that sense of the FBI following one of the people who you interviewed, or how subversive this is right now.
 
(Goran Hugo Olsson): I hope that, but I don't know.
 
(Danny Glover) : I've had several very interesting conversations with a 95 year old, she'll be 96 this year, Chinese activist named Grace Lee Boggs in Detroit who had been involved in movements since she graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1940 and had been involved at Black radicalization movements happening in the workplace. A part of the radicalization happened with the UAW, with people like her husband Jimmy Lee Boggs and others who organized African Americans around views that certainly were views that presented the possibility of transformation through a change in the system itself. And I don't know if the question becomes if African Americans who are often considered the moral compass of this country, this history, if we're prepared to lead this next stage.

We have a Black president. Most people equated him with Martin Luther King. Are we prepared to take that? Historically we have taken that role, whether it's the Black Power movement or the Civil Rights movement. It's these movements that we've been a part of. The arguments of African Americans who at another time and space tried to radicalized labor and bring the issues of African Americans to the labor movement. At one point and time they had a radical labor movement that was happening. I don't know if we are prepared to discuss or to be a part of this next stage at it is. Let's accept the fact that whatever the paradigm we thought we existed in and benefited from has failed us, has failed a majority of not only Americans, but has failed the rest of the world. If we're able to kind of be a part of that in discovering, as they say at the World Social Forum, another world that works for all of us then that.

But are we prepared for that? Places like Detroit. I met a group in Detroit which was a group of about 40 different smaller organizations, it was a big planning from community gardening to organizations that dealt with the incarceration of young Black men. Every single bit. And one of the teachers there said "The question I posed to my students in my fourth grade class was what is it to be a human being?" That was the question that we have to pose to all of us; what does it mean to be a human being? And are we able to look beyond what is happening and the pain that is happening as everybody has said, this historic pain, this epic pain, all of this pain right here, and having that manifest itself in the election of a president that Black people don't want you to criticize.

What is the next stage for us? I remember those faces. When I look at the film I remember the faces of those young men who were reading sometimes the "Red Book"for the first time in 1967, 1968 and they felt the extraordinary power they had in their hands. And all of that has been wasted in so many ways or crushed in so many ways. Are we capable of leading this next stage and adding leadership to this next stage? And that's a question I said only because of symbolically what we played historically in this country's history. But it's not simply just us that are going to lead this next stage.

End.